How to Create an Integrated Social Media Strategy

Social media has become the backbone of modern marketing strategies.

Yet, even as marketers strive for impactful campaigns, they often face a critical challenge—paid and organic social media efforts tend to operate in silos.

This disjointed approach leads to missed opportunities, higher costs, and suboptimal ROI.

The reality? Organic reach is on the decline, while relying exclusively on paid ads can hurt your efforts to build trust and long-term connections with your audience.

The solution lies in creating an integrated social media strategy.

By blending the strengths of both organic and paid social media, smart marketers are unlocking more engagement, improved ROI, and a competitive edge in the social-first digital landscape.

This guide will walk you through what an integrated approach involves, the benefits it brings to your organization, actionable steps to achieve it, and key metrics to measure your success.

Understanding Organic vs. Paid Social Media

Well-balanced social strategies start with understanding the individual roles of organic and paid social efforts.

Each carries its own strengths and weaknesses—and together, they can create powerful, complementary results.

Organic Social Media

Organic social is the long-term foundation of your online presence.

• Strengths: Builds a loyal community, establishes brand credibility, and fosters trust with audiences through non-salesy interactions.
• Activities: Sharing thought leadership articles, responding to comments, and posting updates on company culture.
• Challenges: Limited reach due to declining algorithm priorities, slower audience growth, and difficulty connecting organic efforts to direct ROI.

Paid Social Media

Paid social excels at delivering immediate visibility and targeting specific audiences.

• Strengths: Boosts short-term conversions, drives traffic to landing pages, and generates leads with precision targeting.
• Activities: Paid campaigns for product launches, gated content downloads, or retargeting visitors to convert them into buyers.
• Challenges: Ads can grow stale quickly, come with increasing costs, and don’t nurture trust as effectively as organic.

Key Takeaway

Relying solely on organic limits your reach, while leaning too heavily on paid misses opportunities for trust building. To achieve sustainable success, an integrated social media strategy is vital.

The Core Elements of an Integrated Social Media Strategy

How do you deliver a seamless paid-organic experience for your audience? Follow these four steps to craft your integrated approach.

1. Start by Defining Your Goals

Clarify your objectives and align paid and organic activities to achieve them.

• For Brand Awareness: Focus on creating thought leadership content and amplify top-performing posts with paid ads to reach new audiences.
• For Lead Generation: Nurture trust with organic storytelling while driving immediate actions (like form fills) using targeted ad campaigns.
• For Community Engagement: Spark meaningful interactions through organic posts while boosting them via ads to ensure key audiences see and engage.

2. Use High-Performing Organic Content for Paid Ads

Your organic content can act as the testing ground to identify messaging that truly resonates with your audience.

• Track engagement: Use analytics tools to pinpoint your most impactful posts.
• Amplify: Use platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Meta’s boost feature to promote these posts to a broader audience.
• Prioritize Thought Leadership: Data shows that organic posts from executives and employees often outperform branded accounts. Turn these into paid ads targeting decision-makers for maximum impact.

3. Leverage Thought Leadership to Enhance Organic Success

People trust people. That’s why empowering your team to be the face of your brand is more important than ever.

• Encourage executives and employees to share authentic perspectives through personal LinkedIn accounts or Instagram Stories—then amplify these stories with paid media.
• Example: A relevant LinkedIn post by your CMO with strong engagement might be turned into a lead-gen ad that targets senior marketing professionals.

4. Add Retargeting to Strengthen Engagement

Organic efforts often capture attention without directly driving conversions. Paid social fills this gap by retargeting warm leads (people who interacted with your posts or visited your website).

• Retarget Blog Readers: Serve ads offering a downloadable eBook or premium demo after an individual views a thought leadership piece on your website.
• Reinforce Messaging: If a prospect engages with an organic post, show a follow-up ad emphasizing the benefits of your product or service.

Measuring and Optimizing Your Strategy

Integrated strategies require an integrated approach to measurement. Here are the key metrics for both organic and paid social—and how they work together.

Metric	Organic Social	Paid Social
Engagement Rate	✅	✅
Follower Growth	✅	❌
Lead Conversions	❌	✅
Reach & Impressions	✅	✅
Cost per Lead (CPL)	❌	✅

Key Insights:

1. Organic growth compliments paid campaigns by building an engaged and targeted audience for your ads.
2. Paid campaigns provide short-term conversion and immediate boosts to amplify the impact of organic efforts.

Use tools like Google Analytics, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, or Meta Business Suite to combine these metrics into a cohesive report for your stakeholders.

Own the Future of Social Media

The future of social media strategy lies in human connections, thought leadership, and competitive intelligence.

Platforms like LinkedIn increasingly prioritize human-centric content, giving brands that empower their executives and employees to lead conversations a significant advantage.

Tools like Stack Rank are revolutionizing the way marketers measure competitive engagement, thought leadership influence, and share of voice—turning organic wins into measurable ROI.

Drive Results with a Cohesive Social Media Strategy

An effective marketing strategy thrives on integration. Paid social delivers immediate reach; organic builds trust and strengthens your brand over time. Together, they help you connect with your audience, drive conversions, and gain a competitive edge.

It’s time to stop thinking of paid and organic as separate entities. The future is hybrid, and those who act now will lead the way.

Want to see how your current social strategy stacks up? Sign up for a free consultation today, and we’ll help you identify opportunities to take your results to the next level.